Kristin Plys

This essay examines how two Marxist anti-colonial intellectuals from Portuguese India and French India-Aquino de Bragança and V Subbiahdifferentially theorized movements for independence from colonial rule. Through the analysis of primary source documents in French, Portuguese, Italian and English, I compare V Subbiah's Dalit, anti-fascist anti-colonial Marxism to Aquino de Bragança's internationalist anti-colonial Marxism. Both theorists' approaches have similarities in (1) theorizing the relationship between fascism and colonialism given that the Portuguese Empire was administered by Salazar's Estado Novo and the French Empire was under Vichy rule, (2) rethinking Marxism to better fit the Global South context and (3) intellectual and political connections to Algeria were critically important for theory and praxis. Despite the distinct geographic and social spaces in which they lived and worked, both produced remarkably similar theories of anti-imperialism.

After the 1977 coup that launched General Zia-ul-Haq’s decade-
long military dictatorship in Pakistan, visual arts flourished as part
of many progressive movements. This essay on anti-Zia visual art
explores the intersection of art and left politics. While left mobilization
against the Zia dictatorship took several forms, one under-
emphasized but significant node of opposition was led by artists and
poets. Especially underrepresented among these movements were
the indelible contributions of female artists who were among the
state’s most persecuted. Though the Hudood Ordinances and other
anti-women policies did not explicitly target artists, they effectively
marginalized women from the arts by way of curbs on women’s
mobility and freedom of expression in society at large. Female
artists resisted, refusing to take up calligraphy or otherwise change
their artistic style. Depictions of the female nude became an important
political symbol for artists pushing back against the censorship
of, violence against, and persecution of women. Pakistani feminist
artists’ forms of cultural resistance through art creation have a long
tradition in both South Asia and the Global South more broadly,
but the female nude as the content of their resistance art warrants
deeper investigation. In this essay, I recover the history of Pakistani
women’s resistance through the visual arts then leverage this to
weigh in on contemporary theoretical debates on the depiction of
the nude female body as feminist praxis. The goal of this contribution
is to record Pakistani women’s resistance during the Zia period
so that feminist theory may learn from their actions.

The current proliferation of authoritarianism across both core and periphery is one political articulation of the current crisis of the capitalist world-system. Authoritarianism similarly proliferated in previous periods of crisis, in the 1970s and 80s in the peripheries, and in the 1930s and 40s in the core. In Part I of this essay, I detail how worldsystems analysts have long been attuned to describing and analyzing chaotic moments in between systemic cycles of hegemony, but less attention has been given to the rise of authoritarianism in these chaotic phases. The multiple crises of hegemonic transition engenders an ideological contestation between Fascism and Communism revealing the limitations of Liberalism, the foundational ideology of the world-system. In such periods of hegemonic breakdown, anarchists developed autonomous strategies of resisting authoritarian rule at both the point of production (the worker-occupied and self-managed workplace) and at the point of leisure (the autonomous zone of the infoshop or café as resources and interventions in the joint struggle against capitalism and authoritarianism. These theories are important to recover for the contemporary fight against a resurgent authoritarianism across the world-system in the current conjuncture.

How does one craft an explicitly left theory of anti-imperialism that would animate an anti-imperialist praxis? World-systems analysis has a long history of engagement with theories of anti-imperialism from an explicitly Leninist perspective. For the founding fathers of World-Systems Analysis-Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, and Andre Gunder Frank-anti-imperialism was an early central concern. Each of the four founders of world-systems analysis reads Lenin's theory of imperialism seriously, but each has slightly different interpretations. One significant commonality they share is that they adopt Lenin's periodization of imperialism, seeing imperialism as emergent in the late 19th century as part of a particular stage within the historical development of capitalism. However, as I will argue in this essay, perhaps it would be preferable to temporally expand Lenin's concept of imperialism. Walter Rodney's concept of "capitalist imperialism," as I shall show in this essay, similarly calls Lenin's periodization into question. Thereby, putting Rodney in conversation with Amin, Arrighi, Frank, and Wallerstein, leads me to further historicize world-systems' theories of global imperialism thereby refining existing theories and levying that to build stronger praxis.

During India's Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy , nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century Islamicate poetry was tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called 'Rise of the West' Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success , and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action.

The Indian Freedom Movement (1857-1947) was a signiTcant period which had a politically important impact on the Indian state's subsequent formation. The historiography of the movement was until recently much more monochromatic than the movement itself, highlighting the contributions of "great men." The Subaltern Studies Collective (1980s-present) rejected this approach, taking a broader and more productive approach to telling the story of the movement via the bottom-up contributions to Indian history. Surprisingly, however, what became known as Subaltern Studies has downplayed the empirical role of the working class. One reason for this underemphasis is a speciTc and culturally essentialist mode of appropriating the work of E P Thompson, Carlo Ginzburg, and Hayden White, who are declared inauences on Subaltern Studies. Why that was so remains an important question.

In March 1974, trade union leader and Chairman of the Socialist Party of India, George Fernandes, formed a new independent trade union of railway workers and then led a massive nation-wide strike lasting about a month. Two years later— March 1976—Fernandes was arrested as the principal accused in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy Case, a plot to bomb strategic targets in New Delhi in resistance to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. How did George Fernandes’ political work change over these two years—from engaging in traditional trade union movement tactics during the Railway Workers’ Strike in 1974 to being the ringleader of a plan to bomb strategic targets in resistance to the postcolonial state? Why would an activist who advocated non-violent social movement tactics change strategies and end up leading a movement that primarily uses violent tactics? I argue that in its violent repression of the Railway Workers’ Strike and its illegal imprisonment of the strike’s leaders, Indira Gandhi’s administration demonstrated to Fernandes and other opposition party leaders that there was no room for a peaceful solution to the ever increasing social conflict of early 1970s India. Therefore, when Gandhi instated herself as dictator, longstanding advocates of satyagraha believed that symbolic violence against the state was the tactic most likely to lead to the restoration of democracy in India.

A concept of time is implicit in any theory that endeavors to make sense of human existence. History, particularly world-history or macro-history, is multi-dimensional, relative, and infinite. Comprehending the infinite has long been an epistemological puzzle for both mathematics and philosophy, but one that has never been explicitly contextualized for historical sociological research. Because the infinite needs to be measured by a concept that is similarly infinite, how can one conceive of a non-terminating sweep of history when the tools with which we measure time are themselves finite or use finite increments? By shifting the focus away from the ontology of time to the epistemological issues raised by the concept of infinite time, I contend that historical sociology can begin to incorporate a more explicit understanding of how time affects the results and conclusions drawn from historical research through an understanding of the methodological and polemical implications of the epistemological issues raised by the concept of infinite time. In this article, I contend that an explicit philosophy of infinite time for historical sociology has implications for the epistemological foundations of historical sociology, but more importantly, affects whether historical sociology can describe the political economy of capitalism and develop left praxis.

While the coffee house as a space of political deliberation has been a common feature across the globe, there are few historical cases in which one can analyze the role of such face-to-face political deliberation under totalitarian moments in heretofore democratic states. Of the analogous cases of democratic reversal, India is one of the most important and under-researched. In 1975, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was convicted of corrupt election practices. Rather than concede to the high court ruling, she suspended the constitution and installed herself as India's sole political authority. The Indian Coffee House in New Delhi became the key site of resistance to the Emergency (1975–77). The totalitarian moment pushed contentious politics into the Coffee House, initially galvanizing it: even the older members of Indira Gandhi's Congress Party, who were active participants in India's Freedom Movement, were key participants in coffee house deliberations. Eventually , however, Indian Coffee House was bulldozed and political deliberation crushed. The space of the coffee house may foster political deliberation among different viewpoints, but when interaction is concentrated in one such space, it becomes easier for the state and its agents to suppress oppositional politics and more difficult for both establishment and oppositional politics themselves to retain a diversified public sphere character. While coffee houses and analogous institutions are not adequate substitutes for other forms of democratic politics, therefore, they can encourage expression when other avenues are closed off and nourish the memory of a democratic political culture for the future.

To understand contemporary power—especially war and finance—it is important to examine the origins of global capitalism. This article generates an alternate, modified world-systems perspective that engages with the notion of Eurocentrism. Processes of trade and exchange, relations of production, political power, and military power in Mughal South Asia and in Ming China serve as examples used to describe spaces of power within the world economy before the reorientation of centers of power from Asia to Europe. The development of modern haute finance in the Italian city-states from 1300–1600 are then detailed as they developed while the centers of world power remained in Asia. The development of modern haute finance is then described as it generated “capitalistic” incarnations of class struggle, state making, war making, and ideology/culture. Finally, the key role of Genoese finance capital in the Spanish plunder of Latin American silver is discussed, including its contribution to a global reorientation of power from Asia to Europe.

Worker self-management has proliferated at key historical moments, worldwide, since 1917. In the wake of decolonization and the national liberation movements of the mid-20th century, unprecedented levels were attained across the globe. By examining the major cases of worker self-management that began in 1952–1979 in the periphery and semi-periphery, I highlight the varied historical trajectories leading up to state suppression or absorption of worker self-managed firms. Management literature predicts that all states would respond more favourably to profitable rather than less profitable enterprises; Marxist approaches predict that socialist states would be more likely than capitalist states to favour workers' control, and world-systems analysts would expect states in the semi-periphery to be more hospitable than states in the periphery to worker self-management. I show that none of these theoretical predictions are empirically sustained. Instead, I employ an inductive historical analysis and find that states are equally likely to terminate profitable and unprofitable enterprises, whether in socialist or capitalist states, and in periphery or semi-periphery. To explain this phenomenon, I propose an alternative theory – focused on social unrest and the balance of class forces – for states in the Third World having by and large called a halt to the experiment of worker self-management.

This paper employs world systems analysis as a lens through which to analyse three key contemporary and historical features of political economy in Kerala. First, I detail the plantation economy in historical perspective, showing how the plantation model was an invention of 19th century capitalism in order to mass produce agricultural products in the global south for consumption in the global north. Then, I analyse the remittance economy, showing how contemporary capitalism creates a single market for capital, but restricts labor through the concept of citizenship, and discuss the consequences for migrant labor and families of migrants. I end by discussing what has often been termed the “Kerala Model”, in other words, Kerala’s relatively low GDP per-capita, but high human development indicators including for health, education, and etc.. I conclude that while the capitalist world-system impacts social life in Kerala, Kerala does not simply play a passive role in the capitalist world-system. In fact, through its distinct approach to organising social life, Kerala offers alternatives to dominant ideas of capitalist development thereby potentially shaping the future trajectory of the capitalist world-system.

This article evaluates the contrasting approaches to the relationship among changes in the rate of profit, financialization, and crisis embodied in macrohistorical sociology and international political economy, and situates the financial crisis of 2008 in historical context, with US data from 1929–2008 as the core of the empirical analysis. While this article finds no correlation between either (1) the rate of profit and inflation or (2) cash assets of firms and economic decline, this article does find a correlation between a decline in the rate of profit and the advent of crisis. This article also presents evidence that dovetails with the proposition that crisis is associated with and follows financialization. The findings lend support to the Wallerstein–Arrighi hypothesis that within the context of capitalist hegemonic cycles, a decline in the rate of profit engenders an increase in the cash assets of firms, leading to financialization and, in association with other mechanisms, systemic crisis.

Kondratieff cycles have recently regained popularity in the social sciences as a methodological tool deployed in examining war and
financial crisis. Kondratieff cycles were developed by Nikolai Kondratieff between 1922-1928 and further popularized by Joseph Schumpeter. Within the social sciences, the major debates regarding Kondratieff cycles have occurred within world-systems circles. This article details the ways in which Immanuel Wallerstein has employed the Kondratieff cycle; discusses its theoretical strengths and weaknesses in world-systems analysis, and then reflects on other theoretical possibilities. I argue that the complex relationship among economic, political, military, ideological and cultural forms of power is better captured by the concept of systemic cycles of accumulation, and provide examples of recent work in political science, history, sociology and economics that could benefit from making this conceptual switch.

Kaveh Yazdani's India, Modernity, and the Great Divergence (2017) is an exciting, creative proposition that synthesizes several perspectives within the historical social sciences that are not typically put in conversation with one another. The book asks ambitious, big, questions, and provides a detailed account of the pre-capitalist political economy of Mysore and Gujarat—two regions that are often overlooked in the existing literature on transitions to capitalism. The book begins with a theoretical discussion of Orientalism, Eurocentrism, Modernity, and Capitalism, which situates the book both in the political economy of the world-system, but also postcolonial theory and transitions to modernity. Yazdani, then, poses the question of why did Europe first make the transition to capitalism and not Western India? The following section of the book compares intellectual developments, including those in science and technology, political systems, art, culture, and the development of a public sphere in Europe compared to Western India. From this comparative exercise, he concludes that Asia was often just as dynamic as Europe when it came to ideas, culture, and science and technology. Then, Yazdani spends the bulk of the book detailing the political economy of first Mysore, and then Gujarat, crafting a detailed picture of economy, political bureaucracy, transportation and infrastructure, military, and role of religion in each empire. The book concludes by summarizing the lessons learned about the transition to modernity as seen from early modern Mysore and Gujarat. Namely, that, on the one hand, " non-Westerners … miss the opportunity to accredit and harness the civilisational achievements of the